I am not sure if this is the reason. Euro armor is relatively affordable in the online PAB (0.16 USD). Perhaps the designers were trying to differentiate from the recent Crusader sets of 1990-1992. New elements may have taken the inventory spot. Castle had a variety of new elements including the wizards hat, magic wand, dragon masters helm, dragon, dragon wings, fire, halberd, etc. These were likely deemed more important than the euro armor at that time.

4817 Dungeon does feature the chrome Armada armor. This was probably a good way of clearing out the old inventory of that element.

I think I'd tend to agree with Ben's guess about differentiation. Lego's inconsistency with torsos, leg colors, plume colors, etc, made many Crusaders, Black Falcons, and Black Knights ambiguous as to their allegiance. Notice that Wolfpack (1992), Dragon Masters (1993), and Royal Knights (1995) were all pretty distinctive in their minifigs. Euro-Armor would cover up chest logos (making the figures less distinctive), unless printing was added to the armor, which is more expensive.

Dark Forest (1996) and Fright Knights (1997) weren't quite as distinctive as the 3 prior themes, but similarly didn't use (and didn't really need, style-wise) the armor elements. And by the time Knight's Kingdom rolled around in 2000, the armor hadn't been used since 1994 (more like 1992, though, since the 1994 release was an accessory kit). My guess is at the time it was probably deemed an unnecessary cost.

It's also possible that the mold was a short-term mold that "wore out" after 1994. Hard to say, but its disappearance for about 7-9 years (depending how you want to count it) does seem to be an indicator that it wasn't available in that timeframe. Certainly once it came out again in 2001 for Harry Potter, we've seen it several times-- it could even be that it returned to popular use thanks to fan desire, since that's about the timeframe where Lego started having a closer relationship to AFOL feedback.

DaveE

Last edited by davee123 on Sat Jan 24, 2009 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's only a guess but I suspect that it might have to do with the fact that the armoured figures look a bit plain and marketing may have felt that the element wasn't important to kids. Until KKII, the euro armour pieces were devoid of printing making the figures look comprably dull. Ironically, with the newer lines the figure torsos are blank while the armour is decorated.

While this element is incredibly popular with AFOLs, I imagine that it wasn't a major selling factor with most children. Given that both the Royal Knights and KKI featured vibrant torso prints, the breastplate may have seemed redundant or even counter-productive.

I'm inclined to think it was not a case of mold fatigue though. If so, would lego have really resurrected it for one HP set? <man i had forgotten all about that!> Loved the light grey armor!

Well, I'm inclined to agree with you, but my experience of licenced theme sets is that although you pay a higher price for the "name", the sets do tend to have a variety of interesting pieces including new ones. So I wouldn't entirely consider it unrealistic for the euro-armor to be "re-introduced" just for a Harry Potter set, particularly if Lego did so with the intention that it would be used more subsequently in other sets.

However, this is all just hypothesising.

There may indeed be something to the idea that the euro-armor was a bit limiting in terms of distinguishing factions in the past. There is a greater colour palette and techniques now too, so rather than being constrained to old dark grey as in the past (though presumably black or grey were options) we now have speckled metallic silver, pearl silver, metallic silver, pearl gold, etc. Also the plethora of crazy colours for KK2 - of which I mainly object to bright colours like purple and red - dark green and similar are quite reasonable. I think the bright colours show how it wasn't really an option to do various colours of euro-armor in the past - ordinary yellow, blue, green, etc. would be fairly obnoxious.